We're delighted to present our Poem Of The Day, presented in association with Poetry Ireland.
Today's poem is Promise of a Sunny Day by Paul McCarrick - read it below.
Galway is the promise of a sunny day with definite certainties of rain
wrapped in another promise of a longer November evening
all trapped in a magician's pocket on Shop Street who promises
you the world but gives you wrong directions to the Claddagh.
Along this trail on this Tuesday afternoon, you see men diving
into big pints of stout, drowsed, defeated, drinking the black stuff.
This plan is their first of many savage plans on the good day.
It is probably their first love; the pints, the defiance, Galway.
You hear them tell this to the women, partners, friends, patrons
with bad timing, now caught in the web of addictive tribal craic.
You see from their full-teeth laughs, their faces shaded with dread
that these pints, with the help of predictive hindsight, will be well-intended.
They love the pint of plain as only they can, but they also love whipped breaths
of wilderness that make the evening, stationary solid stones of coast and walls,
market fresh Saturday mornings. It’s what brought you here, organised madness
with enough road markings to fool you to think that, somewhere, there is control.
Galway is probably your first breaking too, the tides high enough to walk across,
the bars low enough to trip over, enough ill-judged nights had to power red heaters
for a lashing month in a smoking area for sardines. You are ten-years full of awe
and wonder and have the perfect vision of cultúr and can still deny the existence
of a fast-approaching future that blows through these busker-lined paths and
breaks cobblestone cereal bowls. You can look at anyone the way Sally O’Brien
might have looked at you on a Tuesday, but we will remember that today is still
indeed a Tuesday with all the promise of a sunny day and definite certainties of rain.
